The 5 Hegemons vs Samurai

 In this game, my opponent was Steve Stead. It was a seesaw battle definitely. The Samurai won the initial dice roll and defended in Coastal, the result of the terrain phase being that there was only a deep water secure flank on table. 

Then came the Scouting, the Samurai got away with only being outscouted by 10%. At the end of deployment, on the Samurai side will be a broken up line of Long Spears intermingled with Skilled Powerbow Infantry. On the Chinese side will be 4 Chariot units on their right, 2 9s of 3 Long Spear and 6 Bow, then 16 Tribal Devastating Chargers, 1 unit behind the other and a unit of Polearms.

The Samurai are split up to counter the threats of the Chinese forces and also to take advantage of my mostly Drilled training.

Initial shooting was fairly ineffectual, wounding units here and there, and scoring the odd skull. My centre left group of Samurai, made up of a Superior 8 and an Average 8 of Long Spears lunged for the Chinese mixed units. In hindsight, I made a mistake in dismounting my Cavalry. I'll elaborate on this later.

Initial combat, contrary to the shooting, was going well for the Samurai and a few bases had been removed from the Chinese side, including 3 from a 6 of Superior Chariots. These chariots had been charged by another 8 of Average Long Spears. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to break the unit before it had a chance to break off from combat.

The photo below shows the casualties resulting from the turning point of the game. A couple of Steve's Tugs are close to breaking, particularly one of the Devastating Charger Tugs and the aforementioned battered Chariots.

Casualties are in the distance, but this photo is very important as it shows that even rubbish troops in your opponents' army are capable of killing generals. In one combat, I had Superior Long Spears against Average Unprotected Combat Shy Bows. I threw the general into combat to make it 5-0 in my favour so I was rolling a red and a green dice against a black dice. The Samurai unit was carrying a wound. The hole in the unit I was fighting, in the middle left of the picture, was caused by my score of a Skull and a wound. Excellent result.

Then came a wound on a black dice, followed by a Skull on the immediate KaB test for killing a base from a file in which a general is fighting. The Samurai general, who was an ally, had clearly slipped on the blood of the Bows his troops had killed, and committed seppuku. Urgh, horrible result.

By the next round, my army had eventually lost enough units to break, but with a consolation prize of having killed a Devastating Charger unit and one of Steve's Skirmishers. Even though the result was a 15-3 to the Chinese, there were very brittle units on the Chinese side.

Now the lessons I've learned from having played the game. First off, dismountable is a situational characteristic, not one that you should use just because you've spent the points on it. It did give my dismounted Cavalry a 5BW range with their Powerbows, but it cost the Samurai their flexibility completely. 

Secondly, intermingling the Powerbow with Long Spears works better against Cavalry than Infantry, and that's if there are Cavalry intermingled, rather than dismounted Cavalry. I should explain that my dismounted Cavalry who faced the unit of Devastating Chargers that I broke also got ripped to shreds as they weren't able to avoid combat.